President Barack Obama's repeated criticism of the nation's police has led to the nation's worst record of race relations than at any time in recent years, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Monday.
"You've had seven-and-a-half years of a black president, seven-and-a-half years of a black attorney general, and a Gallup Report shows race relations are worse than any time in the last 17 years," the veteran politician told MSNBC's
"Morning Joe" program. "Because of how often has he hit the police. He hit the police in Cambridge and he was wrong. He hit the police in Ferguson, he was wrong."
At some point, said Gingrich, the president has an obligation to say there are two sides to the story.
"In places like Chicago, where 3,200 people have been killed during the Obama presidency, we better have a strategy that works," Gingrich said. "We don't."
He pointed to New York City, which reduced its murder rate by 85 percent from where it was when Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor and started further policing.
"Nobody on the left wants to hear that," Gingrich said. "You look at the number of thousands of people who would be alive today if Chicago had New York's strategy."
But they don't, he said, because they believe it to be too intrusive and requires too many police officers, and "they don't want to spend the money on cops. You don't spend the money on cops, you spend the money on funerals."
And Gingrich, who said last week that white Americans can't understand what is going on in the black community, said that it's important to help that understanding happen.
Referring to South Carolina GOP Sen. Tim Scott, who last week described numerous incidents of harassment he has endured at the hands of police officers even after he came to Washington, Gingrich said that it is "very important to understand that you can be a very successful black American and you can have a very good college degree and you can still get harassed."
Also on the program, Gingrich, who came under some criticism last week with his statements on screening immigrants,doubled down on that opinion.
"I believe you should screen every immigrant," he said. "Look at the Tunisian immigrant that just killed 84 people [in Nice, France]. Look at the degree to which ISIS openly says we're sending people across the planet. And how often do you have to have people get killed? We're going to have to come up with a strategy and we're going to have to learn from the Israelis and the European failure."
Meanwhile, Gingrich also applauded GOP presumptive nominee Donald Trump's choice of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate, even though Gingrich himself had been one of the finalists in the race.
"To solve his immediate problem, which is how do you bring the Paul Ryans . . . Mike would do a better job than I would have done," Gingrich said. "As you all know, I have been a national figure now for a long, long, long time . . . as I said, you could run a two-pirate ticket. I think he made the right decision that having a balanced ticket will serve him well."